World East Timor: The Nobel Ramos-Horta Prize for NEW Presidency

© AFP - Valentino Dariel Sousa José Ramos-Horta (Center) welcomes his followers while he officially announces that he will arise in the presidential elections, in Dili on January 23, 2022.

tireless and return on the political scene, the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize, José Ramos-Horta, announces his candidacy for the Presidency of East Timor, his country he defended in exile during 25 years after the Indonesian invasion in 1975. It was not a first for José Ramos-Horta, who has already led Timor in the 2000s and started in a new presidential campaign at the age of 72 years, at the end of an extraordinary existence.

His life is a novel: that of exile and the struggle for independence. From his release of adolescence, he militates for the emancipation of the Timor which at the time is a Portuguese colony. And when Timore resistance unilaterally pronounces the independence of his country in 1975, he was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs while he is only 25 years old.

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He does not know it yet, but he will spend his life on the road, because a few days after his appointment, the Indonesia of the Dictator Suharto takes advantage of this change of political regime to invade the East Timor and suppress ultra-violently. Any dispute.

Ramos-Horta manages to escape, finds refuge in Australia and then in the United States and will become the voice of his people abroad. Former journalist, passionate about jazz and cinema, he becomes a familiar face of the UN platform in New York where he pleads tirelessly for the recognition of war crimes committed in Timor by the Indonesian army.

In 1996, he was crowned with the Nobel Peace Prize, and three years later, when Indonesia ended up at the international pressure, it returns to the country. Prime Minister in 2006, President until 2012 and apart from the race for a new mandate, aged 72, he goes back in the countryside for the last time.

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